Managing media with Drupal 8

With the stable release of the Media Entity module, Drupal 8 now has a robust and scalable solution to offer its users a customized media management. This solution is based on a number of contributed modules which relies on the heart of Media entity to enrich gradually, and also facilitate their respective maintenance and evolution. Note that several of these modules (such Entity browser) were designed, like the Inline Entity Form Module originally developed as part of Drupal Commerce, to be used with files or images, but in fact with any Drupal 8 entity type, making their use case even more interesting.

But often a robust solution, agnostic and reusable requires therefore an initial configuration effort. With a rich solution, complex configuration. Let’s explore how to set up a media management on Drupal 8 with the Media Entity collection.

The modules which compose the Media Entity collection

The different modules of the Media entity collection are:

• Media entity : it is the core module of the solution, the main module wich provide basic entities
• Media entity image : it will allow to manage images, recover their EXIF ​​if necessary and save them in dedicated fields
• Media entity slideshow : it will allow to establish slideshow based on Media entities
• Media entity audio : this module allows you to manage audio media type
• Media entity Twitter : for shipping and managing tweets in your library
• Entity Browser : this module will allow us to set up an interface to add or select media directly from the content’s edit form. Note that this module can help manage any entity and thus not just the media. A sub module Entity Browser IEF can integrate Entity Browser with Inline Entity Form
• Inline Entity Form : this module is a generic alternative to Entity Browser to add or select a media from the content’s edit form
• Video Embed Field : this module independent of the Media Entity collection has a full integration with it and enables the integration of embedded videos in your library.

There are also other modules to integrate other media types, such as documents or Instagram. Their list should not stop evolving, media entity allowing any contributed module to connect easily to his core and enrich it with a new media type.

Also note the module Entity Embed, complementary to the Media entity collection, which allows us to insert the media from our library in any body text, or as the name suggests, any entity type (content, blocks, etc.).

Configuring media bundles

After installing these modules (at minimum Media entity, Media entity image, Inline Entity form and Entity Browser to manage a library of images), the first step is to create a first media bundle.

When you create a bundle, we must select the Provider type that are implemented by the various contributed modules. Here we select the Provider type Image. For now we can not configure anything more, and we can save our bundle.